Nokia and Microsoft are pumping €9m (£7.5m) into a university to promote app development and startups that'll feed their mobile tech alliance.
Finland's Aalto University will receive the cash to fund a new software development programme called AppCampus over the next three years, the companies said Monday.
The scheme aims to " …

Re: Good idea

Not sure if serious. But as an iOS dev, I can say that apple incentivise me plenty with a nice chunk of cash each month.

The difference: my rewards come from customers who appreciate my work enough to pay for it, rather than a company giving me cash in the hope something will happen because there aren't enough paying customers there to make it commercially viable.

Still, MS and Nokia are in a tough spot: customers aren't interested in the platform without the support of plenty of good apps, devs aren't making plenty of good apps without plenty of paying customers. You can argue all day about whether it's the chicken or the egg, but if you've got neither your plate is staying empty.

Good luck to them, if they're extremely lucky they'll hit gold and the whole platform will benefit (and so will everyone else if there's a competitive 3rd platform), and the students can learn plenty and ride the gravy train for a while.

Wait, hold on... did I see symbian mentioned there? Who the hell would write for symbian now?! Retro fans?

Re: Good idea

Like most university projects, the university owns the software that students submit for marking. This is why a fair number of PhDs/masters in the CS sector never materialise as the writers stop their research at the university and sell it to a company/spin it off as a startup.

As a way to counter this, Bristol uni offered students a 30% stake in a business derived from their degree/phd submissions.

If the finnish university followed this model that would leave students with about 23p for every £1 the app is listed at. Probably less after "costs" are deducted. So not great.

And as I said above, the Uni owns it, so the student has no entitlement to anything.

Re: Good idea

However good, bad, or indifferent you might think WP7, it's off to a slow start. It is not popular in the market.

WP7 cannnot sustain a company the size of Nokia. If competitors in the WP7 arena start taking any real share of that market, Nokia will tumble - and quickly.

So there are really only two options:

- Get a W8/WP8/whatever successor phone out the door really quickly.

- Diversify.

I suspect the former of these won't really work; the brand is somewhat damaged at present, and ditching a new product in the short term for something inherently incompatible is going to cause all sorts of problems.

So diversificatrion is Nokia's only real hope. And they're going to have a tough time doing an Android (or anything Linux-based) unless they break with MS.

Re: Good idea

"Wait, hold on... did I see symbian mentioned there? Who the hell would write for symbian now?! Retro fans?"

The few developpers whom have brains cells left instead of a reality distortion field.

Symbian still is a heck of a large market. You'd be a real dumb-ass not to program for it.

Plus it's a proven fact that putting your eggs in just one basket sooner or later becomes regrettable. All tyou arrogant fanboys do is create aversion towards tyourself and your apps which WILL eventually come around. There's absolutely NO reason for this demeaning behavior towards Symbian.

But since you're a already filthy rich you don't need the revenue from all these potential non-iOS consumers.

"Ideate"

Re: "Ideate"

Well to be fair to him, 'ideat' is Medieval Latin (something formed as an idea), but i've a mind not to be fair as I can't stand it myself. I'm sure Mr. Öistämö meant it more like the wonderful folks over at www.ideate.com intended, and hence worthy of ridicule...

"It correlates the linked relations of every interaction to bring together just-the-right people, data, capabilities and policies based on context. This enables Ideate to enrich every system response with targeted business intelligence."